Making Sure You Operate In The Cloud Marketplaces As An API Service Provider

27 Nov 2017

This is a sponsored post by my friends over at SlashDB. The topic is chosen by me, but the work is funded by SlasDB, making sure I keep doing what I do here at API Evangelist. Thank you SlashDB for your support, and helping me educate my readers about what is going on in the API space.

As the cloud giants like AWS, Microsoft, and Google continue to assert their dominance of the digital world, one aspect of their operations I’m watching closely has to do with their marketplaces. Google’s marketplaces are still very Android focused, but Amazon and Microsoft have shifted their recent editions of their marketplaces to be more cloud oriented, and accommodating a wide variety of applications, machine learning models, as well as APIs and API-focused services. While these marketplaces are still growing, and asserting their role in the digital economy, they are something I advise API providers, and service providers to be keeping a close eye on, and begin considering how they will want to operate within these environments.

If you are an API service provider, and you are selling services to API providers anywhere along the API lifecycle, I recommend you follow the example of friends over at SlashDB, who have their database to API offerings in two of the leading marketplaces:

AWS - Automatically constructing a REST API to databases for reading and writing on the AWS platform.

Azure Marketplace - SlashDB enables you to do more with traditional databases and Microsoft Azure.

As more companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies move their databases into the cloud, SlashDB sees the opportunity to help them quickly turn databases and tables into web interfaces for querying data. Having your API service ready to go, in the environments where your potential customers are already operating is how much of this API stuff will go down in the future. Amazon has set the stage for how we’ll be delivering IT infrastructure over the last decade with the introduction of the cloud, and Google and Microsoft are quickly playing catch up. The savvy API service providers understand their role in this cloud evolution and make sure their services are available as retail solutions, but also as plug and play wholesale solutions in these cloud marketplaces.

SlashDB is clearly serving the deployment and management aspects of the API lifecycle, but I’m tracking on virtualization, testing, monitoring, security, and other aspects of doing business with APIs who are also deploying using these cloud marketplaces. I’m also seeing an uptick in the growth of machine learning models being made available via AWS, Azure, and Google, demonstrating that the algorithmic evolution of the API sector will occur in these environments. The algorithmic wave of APIs is just getting started, but publishing APIs from your databases on the leading cloud platforms is standard operating procedure for businesses of all shapes and sizes in 2017. Are your API services available in the AWS or Azure marketplaces?